Place, Body, Memory: River Waters and Imminence of the Past in Place

Keywords: Body, Memory, Place, Water, Phenomenology, Turkey
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 15

Abstract

Everyday, "banal", personal memories (of persons, events and places) remain underrepresented within the field of memory studies, which is mainly occupied with collective-social memories. Also, when we talk about memory, we mainly refer to a mental capacity – to remember and reclaim, to retain and retrieve. What is mostly overlooked are the ways in which the act of recollection occurs within and through the corporeal-material interaction of our bodies with environments. From a phenomenological perspective, though, memory is not the act of remembering that occurs in an isolated mind, but a complex inter/corporeal and situational process in which places, bodies and things re-enact the past. In this contribution, I particularly aim to discuss body memory, not limited to implicit recollection of pre-reflexive knowledge that is embodied in bodily actions, but as broader range of memories of “being bodily in the world”, drawing on the phenomenological tradition. Building on the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward S. Casey and Thomas Fuchs I aim to demonstrate, employing the empirical case of anti-hydropower struggles in the East Black Sea region of Turkey, how certain places, situations and bodily sensory-affective encounters functions as memory cores that can recall and release enclosed memories and how the corporeal survival of the past, in the bodies of people and in the waters of the rivers, is constitutive of political subjectivities against the hydroelectric power plant development in the region.